


I Dreamed a Dream

by TheGreenestGreenToEverGreen



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Canon divergent from 14x09, Demons, Despair, Eventual HEA, Flashbacks, Gen, Ghosts, Isolation, Jack’s powers, Nephilim, Nuclear Winter, SPNDystopiaBang2019, TFW 2.0, Vampires, Werewolves, atmospheric prose, background gore and death, canon monsters - various, changing POVs with each chapter, dark themes, early season memories, implied child death - minor character, spoilers for first half of season 14
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-06
Updated: 2019-06-06
Packaged: 2020-04-07 03:52:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 8
Words: 21,149
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19076935
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheGreenestGreenToEverGreen/pseuds/TheGreenestGreenToEverGreen
Summary: Six beings stand alone as the world crumbles and gasps it dying breath -  a world of death from sickness and starvation; a world where monsters walk the day without fear; where the living wait for death only to find Death is no comfort.Above this world sits the Archangel who was its architect. Below it waits the Vessel who could not let go - who laughed as it burned. And somewhere unknown is a man lost to his family. He fights, though his strength is almost gone. The one who was looking for him is broken - his hope destroyed. And the last Angel is not enough. He was never meant to stand alone.This world is nightmare - but when you are alone in the terror of the night who can lead the way to salvation?





	1. PROLOGUE - There Was A Time When Man Was Kind

**Author's Note:**

> Special thanks to the wonderful Wendibird for services above and beyond in Beta-ing and being generally awesome. I can’t express how much I appreciate all the incredible help, advice and support. If there is something you as a reader enjoy about this fic you can probably thank Wendibird for it ❤️. Please check out their amazing fics on AO3: [Sumira79 ](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sumira79/pseuds/Sumira79/works), and/or go give some love on tumblr: [Wendibird](https://wendibird.tumblr.com/).  
>  Any remaining mistakes are mine and mine alone.
> 
> The beautiful Artwork in Chapter 4 was provided by Angel. I hope you the readers will love it as much as I do! Thank you ever so much Angel! 🤗 [Link to Tumblr Art post](https://angel-with-a-moonsword.tumblr.com/post/185404047537/here-are-the-two-arts-i-made-for-the).  
> 
> 
> Collection **SPNDystopiaBang2019** \- A big thank you to the Bang moderators for all their hard work co-ordinating and running this bang so smoothly.

—o0o—

**Victory**

The Cleanser of Worlds filled the sky like the coming of dawn. Framed against the velvet backdrop of space, his skin was littered with the cold glow of a thousand distant stars. The crystal pinpricks illuminating a face so serene in its icy beauty that it rivaled the unfiltered light of the sun and within that eldritch visage, eyes - sharp as a diamond blade and blazing twice as bright - were locked on the insignificant blue green marble drifting below.

From this vantage point the earth lay undisturbed, it’s colors bright and swirling like the first day of creation, like the wonder of the new world from the time before the apes had spread like a plague across its surface.

But appearances can be deceiving. The world was changed. It had been cleansed and made new. And it was He who had caused this change.

Deep in thought the Archangel languidly flexed His wings, six vast white sails that streamed from behind its form and obscured the void. Appendages whose glory would shine purest white platinum, wreathed in the elegant shape of feathers, were the human mind capable of perceiving them. The wings flittered and rippled as if caught in a current, the movements stemming from a lift of human looking shoulders, like a horse twitching its flanks at the bite of a fly. Like a man adjusting an unfamiliar coat the human shape shrugged lightly even as the being’s true form - an incomprehensible whirling boheamouth of energy - overlayed the mundane movement. Within the core of the massive lightning edged storm of grace sat the Dean Winchester suit, still an unfamiliar irritation to a being who had spent millennia free of such bounds, but a minor inconvenience, irrelevant in the face of all that had been accomplished. The small human form, honored to bear the abundance of an archangel’s grace, was a necessary anchor to the world of men - it was His sword, His true vessel, a well crafted tool which allowed Him to carve His will upon the world of men.

_His will._ Fierce joy flooded the being at the thought.

_For His was the Kingdom. The Power. And The Glory._

_Forever and ever would it be so._

_Amen._

—o0o—

Grey dust covered the ruined camp and Adam where he sat. Grey dust covered everything these days; it was carried on the wind that never ceased its howling. It wormed its way beneath clothes and into the corners of eyes and the creases of frowns. The world was grey, color lost and forgotten.

This grey place had once been a salvage yard on the edge of a small city in South Dakota. The main house had long since burned to the ground, its ashen remains were sad and broken, casting a forlorn and deserted feel to the air as the black ruined timbers crouched over a graveyard of rusted cars surrounded by an old chain fence.

Adam was not concerned with the ambiance just now. The 10-year-old’s parents had found the scrapyard about a week ago and decided to set up camp. In these dark times cities were not safe to enter. Any place with a concentration of people had soon drawn a concentration of monsters. But if you were careful and smart about it you could skirt a city’s suburbs, hunting the abandoned houses and scavenge well enough to find useful supplies without attracting undue attention.

Finding supplies while avoiding attention was all that mattered. There were no such things as shops any more, or gas stations. If you were very lucky you could barter with some good folk, but Good Folk were hard to find too. Mostly you scavenged or went without and currently they were going without fuel. The battered family station wagon had been running on fumes. Not many cars still traveled the broken roads and gas wasn't exactly easy to find. Adam’s daddy had said maybe they could siphon gas from the abandoned vehicles in this scrapyard they found, but hours of fruitless searching had turned up only sludgy dregs. Good finds, like fuel or weapons or food, was always snatched up quickly by passing scavengers. Fuel had been hard to find for years. It was only now that most people had given up travel that you could scrounge up enough to limp on a few more miles.

So it wasn’t really surprising that the scrapyard had no gas, but what it did have was a sturdy chain fence and enough old metal to build a defendable camp. If they didn’t have fuel to travel on there were worse places to stop.

It had taken the boy and his father about an hour to lay out their bedrolls in a secluded spot and build a rickety lean-to as cover. Mommy had been cautiously exploring while they did so, using a heavy metal pole to dig through the debris of the main house and doubling as a makeshift weapon just in case. It had been the best news all week when she found a stash of canned food in an old collapsed cellar beneath the floor. A lucky find she said, buried by rubble from the fire, missed by any others. Daddy had said the owners must have been Doomsday Preppers and that the family were damn lucky that they’d hidden their stuff so well. Even if all the occult symbols in the cellar looked like some kind of Monster writing. (People avoided anything that hinted of Monsters these days. No need to go looking for trouble Daddy said. But food was food, monster writing or no.)

Adam didn’t know for sure what a Doomsday Prepper was, but he was grateful to those long gone people for saving so much food. His dad had even cracked a rare smile (Adam had forgotten what that looked like) when he found the big hunting knife along with an old rifle buried in a sack behind the food. There were only a few bullets with it, but they had glinted a pretty silver in the dull morning fog. Mommy had said that now they were much safer, but she had still kept hold of her heavy metal pole, just in case.

The small boy had been hopeful then, remembering what safe used to feel like. Long ago when he was very little, Mommy would smile and make him Chocolate Chip cookies. Back then Daddy wasn’t always frowning and they would go to the park and play on the swings. He had his own bedroom with Transformers wallpaper and a teddy bear that kept him safe at night when he was tucked up warm in his bed. (Beds were the best. Even better than the back seat of the car. Adam remembered beds!) There had also been the little girl next door (she had a front tooth missing and one of her pigtails always came loose). She would play Dragon Slayers with him in their backyards, using sticks to slash at weeds and the clean washing hanging on the line. Back before they knew that dragons were real.

She was dead now. The girl from next door. Daddy said almost everyone was dead. If they didn't die when the sky first burned and the loud wind knocked over the tall buildings, then they got the coughing sickness, where you got purple splotches and your hair fell out. His Mommy has that. She says she is fine, but Adam sees the blood when she coughs. He knows that blood is bad. Blood is supposed to be on the inside. Once it's on the outside you get dead pretty quick. There are some things that you learn fast, even when you are only little.

Now though, Adam was sat in the dust. That dust as grey as his thoughts. His dad’s prized hunting knife was trembling in his grasp. To stop it moving he clenched the grubby fingers of his small hand tight around the handle and pressed his fist against the leg of his ragged jeans. The holes in the knees of his jeans let in the wind and several inches of his ankle peeked from the ragged bottoms. The material was so thin he would have been able to see through the seat. (If he ever took them off - not that he ever did. No point with nothing else to change into.) It made sitting in the dirt even colder, but everything was cold these days. Mommy had said they would look and see if they could find him another pair - but there hadn't been time for that.

He wasn’t sure why his mind had strayed from his shaking hands to his worn out jeans. Except maybe thinking about the cold and his visible knobbly knees was easier than thinking about Mommy and Daddy. And much easier than thinking about last night. But now his wandering eyes were drawn down to the knife pressed against his skinny leg. Daddy said that even little boys needed to know how to fight or they would end up dead little boys. Mommy had frowned when he said that but she hadn't hugged Adam and laughed at Daddy like she used to. So if Daddy said Adam had to be brave then he should try to be brave and hold the knife steady.

The boy’s thin chest rose in a determined breath, the knife now much firmer in his fist, and satisfied he raised his eyes to look out across the camp.

The wind was blowing, as usual. It whistled through the metal shards propped around the empty fire pit. It shushed as it fluttered past the ragged sleeping blankets scattered on the ground in front their lean-to and the strewn tumble of packs that had held their few supplies. It caused him to shiver, but despite the cold Adam didn’t get up to make a fire. Fires were dangerous. Daddy said you had to keep them small and hidden or they brought the monsters. And there are so many monsters now. Sometimes Adam woke crying silently in the middle of the night because he dreamed that the monsters had gotten them. Mommy used to say that it was just bad dreams but she doesn't say that anymore. She doesn't say anything anymore.

The boy couldn’t help glancing towards the blood splattered body that lay on the far side of the camp among the sleeping rolls. Today he’d mostly tried not to look but he thought to himself that she was probably as cold as he was - her skin had turned blue. Where it wasn’t a dark flaky rust red. He meant to glance away quickly, like he had all day whenever his eyes strayed, but this time he noticed that her eyes had started to pop out from her head… like a puffer fish. (He’d seen one on a cartoon once. It had been funny. He missed cartoons.) Mommy shouldn’t look funny just now, but Adam mostly thought that she just looked scared. He didn’t like the idea of her being scared but he didn’t suppose that being dead was anything to be happy about.

Adam couldn’t really tell if his daddy was scared or not. Most of his face was missing. Probably the monsters ate it. And probably his heart too. Not that he knew what all the inside bits looked like if you pulled them out. But there was a big empty hole in Daddy’s chest. So he guessed that the monster probably ate his heart. Maybe Adam had heard someone say that once - back when they first started travelling and people on the road would talk to each other and swap warnings and stories. Monsters liked to eat people’s hearts. He couldn’t remember for sure though if it was just hearts specifically or other bits too. It would be nice if there was someone to ask. Maybe he could ask Mommy... But another look at her frozen face told him she probably wouldn’t answer.

While he had been trying and failing to not think about his Mom or Dad, the grey smudge of light that was the sun had lowered in the equally gloomy sky. The shadows were crowding closer. Night was coming. Adam knew he should get up out of the dirt and hide. It was what he did last night. What Mommy told him to do. “Run Adam. You find the smallest space you can squeeze into and you hide. You don't move. You don't make a sound. You barely breathe.” That's what she had said when the monsters started howling at the fence. And that's what Adam had done.

From buried deep within the biggest pile of vehicles he could find, in a hiding place the tiny boy had lost several layers of skin squeezing into, he had heard Daddy firing his rifle. (That had worried Adam. Daddy would be angry that he had to use up his new shiny bullets.)

Then the screaming had started. So much screaming.

Adam hadn’t moved or made a sound all night, no matter how scared he was or how many times the footsteps scrambled over the wreckage above his head. Snarls and howls ringing out over the scratching sounds of claws. And when the black of night had finally lightened to the gloom of day and the noises had long since stopped, he had crept frozen and stiff from his hiding spot to see Mommy and Daddy laying on the ground. They hadn’t moved since. He had begged and pleaded and shook them, but they hadn’t heard him. But that was what happened when there was too much blood on the outside of a person. After a while you didn’t move, you didn’t talk, you didn’t do nothing but slowly turn black and stinky. Dead people never move…. well unless they become monsters.

His mind was still scattered and it was full dark now. Time seemed to be moving strangely. He had wasted the light lost in his thoughts and now he would need to hurry. It was going to be a cold night (it was always a cold night) and it was past time that he got a blanket or something before he moved to his hiding spot again. He knew he should get up from the ground but it was at that moment though, when he had finally tensed to begin rising, that Adam heard the first moans, low against the wind. They froze him like a deer in headlights. Unable to move even a muscle, he listened hard as he could. Maybe the monsters were back already. Come back to eat him all up.

It turned out though that the sound moaning through the air wasn’t the monsters from last night. It was Mommy. She was moving. Kinda. Well not _Mommy_ mommy, because now there were two of her; the Mommy who had lain cold and silent all day and a new grey tattered shape, barely visible against the night. The new one looked just like Mommy only faded like she was under water.

At first Adam wanted to be happy. The sad see-through monsters didn’t often attack. And even a pale grey Mommy might be better than no mom at all. But the moans coming from her were already getting louder.  She didn’t stop making the terrible noises - not to breathe or to talk to him or to check on Daddy - she just moaned, then wailed, then screamed and screamed.

Instantly Adam found himself back in the night before as the worst noise he had ever heard ripped through his ears, stopping his thoughts and halting his heart. Only this time he knew how the screams ended.

The precious knife dropped from limp fingers and landed unnoticed in the dirt as the boy desperately covered his ears with his hands and buried his face in his knees - his eyes squeezed tight shut. “No Mommy. No Mommy. Please no. Please stop. Please stop.” He didn’t know he was begging, didn’t even realize he was speaking, he wouldn’t have been able to stop either way. The screaming that cut to his core covered up everything else, all sight, all other sound, all other thoughts. Nothing else remained, just the sounds of his mother’s screams and his desperation for it to stop.

The apparition didn’t listen to Adam’s pleas, it didn’t see him or know him, all it knew was its own pain and despair. So it continued to scream - the ear shattering shrieks drowning out the whimpers of a lone little boy.

The same little boy that didn’t hear the sounds of more monsters approaching. What was one more noise in the dark…?

—o0o—

This was Michael’s world. A new world. A better world.

A world of grey creeping death from sickness or starvation. A world of gnashing, biting monsters that walked the day without fear. A world where the dead swarmed the Earth because Heaven was no more. Where the living waited for death, only to find Death was no comfort.

A world without Angels.

A world without Heroes.

A world without Hope.

A world where there was only…. HIM.

And the Archangel looking down on it all smiled, for He thought it was good.


	2. CHAPTER 1 - When Hope Was High And Life Worth Living

—o0o—

**The End (6 Years Earlier)**

**Nick’s POV**

The persistent crunching of dry grass as it was crushed under every foot fall should have been irritating, but Nick didn’t hear it, lost in a grey fog that shrouded his mind and obscured the surrounding landscape along with the evidence of his passing. This high in the mountains the horizon stretched for miles offering green views to inspire the soul, but to the wandering man it seemed as if the air itself was weighed down with despair and his eyes were blind to the beauty.

He traveled the deserted road wrapped in a bubble of isolation created by his mind, the lonely noise of his footsteps left to drift aimlessly on the wind, just like his thoughts.

_I had everything once. Seems like such a long time ago. These precious tiny memories that I should treasure…. but they just…. slip away. Doesn’t matter that I try to hold them tight, hanging on to their warmth, trying to keep what little feeling I can._

_She was beautiful. I remember that much. Sarah. My Wife. The sweetest voice. A laugh that would brighten any day. I can almost see the smile on her face on that day she told me we’d be a family. Happiest day of my life. That is, until the day in the hospital when she passed me this red faced tiny bundle, and whispered, tired but happy: “We have a son Nick.” It was like I had never known color before that moment. Had never heard music. Had never felt the sun on my face before that day._

_Then Teddy learned to smile. It didn’t matter about sleepless nights and round the clock feeding schedules. His blue eyes looked up into mine and his face creased into this amazing smile…. and he gurgled. There was more beauty in that one moment than in all the rest of the world put together.You don’t know love until you know that feeling. It was everything. My beautiful wife. My child's laughter._

_Guess I missed that first clue. Should have known I wouldn’t be allowed to be happy. The only reason you get raised so high is to be slammed back down into the ground. Can’t have any of us actually finding contentment, can we?_

_But why did my fall have to be a blood soaked crib and a cold tiny body that would never laugh again? And not just to lose him but to lose both people who made me happy? To leave me holding my dead son next to the silent body of my beautiful wife who would never share my grief or ease my pain._

_It isn’t fair. What had been my crime to be punished like that? That I had loved too much? Had dared to find joy in this miserable world?_

_And now I'm not even allowed to keep my happy memories. They just drip away like blood from a wound, my thoughts now so scattered and hard to hang on to. But of course the feeling of my despair is as real to me today as it was the first day. Because if my crime was happiness, stands to reason despair must be my punishment._

_I was so lost. Until He came. And I had no idea what I agreed to, but He was the Sun. A gleaming beacon that would wash away my pain and raise me from the dark._

_The Light Bringer._

_Everything is confused after He joined my mind. He burned so bright. So hot. More than anyone could bear. It was like being struck by lightning. Being consumed by fire. I can’t even begin to describe the pain, like lava had replaced the blood in my veins... it lit my soul, it left no room for anything else. A whirlwind. A tornado. Too much but never enough. No drug compares. So I held tight to the storm, clung on with everything I had - even as it felt like my muscles burned and were seared away from my bones - it was hold on or be thrown back into the empty, cold void._

_Only the wave didn't crest forever like He promised. I was dropped back into that emptiness and desolation anyway. He left me for his ‘true vessel’, He abandoned me. Threw me away like old trash. (My god, my god why hast thou forsaken me?!) Left me hollowed out and emptied, crushed to the ground to wallow in the mud. All that was left at my center, all that was left of me were the ice burned edges of a vast hole. I was nothing._

_After a time He came back and I thought I was restored, but just as quickly He discarded me once again. When I finally woke up, for the first time truly myself in a long time, I found myself held prisoner by the Winchesters and accountable for crimes not my own. I tried to fill my emptiness then. I tried to remember, to recapture something from Before. That human light and joy that had been my everything back at the start… Sarah…. Teddy… happiness. But those memories were too dim. I had no other choice but to return to the memories of the Storm. So I chased that feeling with everything I had left._

_It was not enough. Nothing lifted me high enough. No revenge eased my pain. No power would fill the void. Life was shadows and dust in the wind and the taste of it was cold and bitter on my tongue._

_What I needed was the fire. The fire that burns like ice at the core of the sun. And now that I have found a way, I will do what I must. I have the will for that at the last._

—o0o—

The metal gate which interrupted the fence and barred the road was tightly secured, but the guard booth behind it stood empty, abandoned by its owners. Mountains rose high around the isolated outpost and the air caught in their towering embrace seemed hushed as if with reverence or dread.

Nick had thought this place would still be guarded. Not that he had formulated a plan to deal with any guards. It had taken him weeks just to sift through the light and glare of his memories to remember that time when He had stood in an Oval Office. An impostor with access to the inner workings of the Free World. Of course that hadn't been _Nick_ , that had been _Him_. (In the time when He had abandoned Nick). But when the angel had returned, all that memory had swirled through their head. Too much to bear, too much to see. It had left him feeling blinded, his eyes watering like he had stared into the white desert sun. He hadn’t even thought to try searching through the glare.

Now that he was once again alone Nick had nothing but time. Time to pick through the wreckage of their memories. Time to tease out important facts. Like the location of a secret military outpost. A final line of defense for the Ruler of The World. A place to hide as the world died.

It was odd that this place stood abandoned though. Of course his brother … Lucifer’s Brother, The Archangel Michael … had wreaked havoc on the world. Nothing was as it should be.

After Michael had taken captive the Nephilim boy and possessed Dean Winchester - (bitter envy coated Nick’s tongue at the very thought of the Winchesters. That Angels should fight like dogs to wear the skins of the Winchesters, while ‘lesser’ men such as he were left in the dust. How was it that they should be so favored while he whose only crime was to love too much, should be so damned?) - but wearing the ‘perfect’ vessel and holding the Nephilim captive, nothing had stopped the Archangel becoming this world’s new god. And His first act had been to set loose an army of hybrid Monster-kind, rising from the shadows and overwhelming the day.

The human world had not been prepared. Governments had declared states of emergency and martial law. Panic had spread as infrastructure began to break down. People feared to leave their homes and go into work. Hospitals were overwhelmed with those bitten, or torn apart, or infected. Within days the roads had become blocked with those trying to flee and abandoning their vehicles when the gridlocked traffic was overrun by the hoards. Supplies had run low surprisingly quickly after the transport systems failed and with hungry bellies folk had turned to rioting and looting. Anyone with a gun shot first and didn’t bother asking questions later. It was everyone for themselves. It was chaos.

That would have been enough to conquer the world but the First Commander of the Armies of Heaven had also turned on Heaven itself. Michael had slaughtered this world’s remaining angels and Heaven fell, flooding the Earth with the souls of the dead expelled from paradise. You could not hide from the dead. They were everywhere. At first the ghosts were just some new horror for scared people to whisper about, minor compared to the things that actually wanted to eat you, but they soon became violent and angry. At least the military could protect folk from some of the monsters (if they had enough fire power) but they had no defense against those who were already dead.

Nick had watched from the sidelines as ragged packs of hunters struggled to put out the fires, to train volunteers and military units. But the hunters had been too few, the monsters and the ghosts too many and every human casualty had only added to the hoards of the turned or the dead.

Nick had known a lost cause when he saw one. He lived a lost cause.

Blackouts had become more common recently as the untended power stations began failing. The military had withdrawn to fortified zones leaving most to fend for themselves. People stuck without means of transport barricaded themselves into what shelters they could, using makeshifts weapons against vampires, werewolves and ghouls, the numbers of Monsters increasing every day. Hunger and disease had already started to spread through the population as sanitation broke down in the overcrowded shelters. The hospitals had worked as long as they could but the monsters like Shifters and Wraiths that were undetectable from humans had torn through the sick with glee, so they had stopped admitting new patients, unable to restock supplies regardless. The world fell to its knees, huddling in militarized outposts making a last stand against the dark.

Nick would have thought that a base like this would be utilized in times such as these. It was high in the mountains, safe from the population dense areas that the monsters liked to hunt. But maybe the soldiers had more important places to guard with the few resources available. DC was still making a stand last he heard. But maybe they were all already dead.

Whatever the reasons, Nick did not spend too long pondering the absent soldiers. The fact that this one base was abandoned worked in his favor. He might almost be tempted to think that someone up there was looking out for him, if he didn’t know that the only one up there was Michael and that bastard didn’t care.

It wasn’t easy to climb the 8ft rusted gate at the entrance to the camp, but without the backup of armed guards it wasn’t half the deterrent it should have been. So in short time he found himself wandering the empty compound, unobserved and unobstructed, searching amongst administration buildings, single story barracks and vehicle hangers until he found what he sought: massive reinforced doors in the side of the mountain, discreetly stamped with the mark of the Oval Office.

The code for the doors were another prized parcel of information that he had been able to tease out of his addled Presidential memories. To the left of the giant entrance a small mechanical keypad had waited for him, ready for him to enter the 8 digit number. The doors had obediently opened before him with only a quiet wail of disuse.

How funny that there was power here, still working, just waiting in this abandoned outpost for soldiers who would never return, while out there families died for want of heat and light. Most likely this military hideout would also have food and supplies to last for years. The perfect place for important men to wait out the storm. Everything one could ever want, stockpiled by the greedy fearful and now left forgotten to gather dust. The world was one big joke these days.

He was not interested in the folly of men though, he was here with a purpose. A purpose that was forefront in his mind as Nick strolled through the hanger and into the side of the mountain. He ignored the armored vehicles and crates of weapons and power packs. He was looking for an elevator. What he needed, what he was really here for, would be down deep below the earth.

The same code for the main door also opened the elevator. It was convenient. But then this was a back up, back up location. A last resort. The prime locations probably had retina scans, DNA prints and state of the art access. If they were reduced to using this location then most likely a lot of people were dead and at least a code could be passed to a deputy.

This meant that within a few taps he was stepping through the open doors of a small steel elevator. He had expectantly turned to face forward again even before the doors had slid closed and the elevator began its descent.

Nick's thoughts drifted quietly in the time it took to travel down. It was a long way down. The plain mirrored walls hummed gently and there was no canned music to break the silence and only his blank reflection was present for company. But finally the steel doors opened onto a long, grey, concrete corridor and a series of increasingly reinforced doors that the man passed through one after the other until at last he gained entrance to the bunker.

The presidential space was more lavish than the bunker the Winchesters lived in. No comfort had been spared for the Big Man, or at least his last remaining representative.

Cool, soothing Up-lights illuminated the still air and the temperature was pleasantly comfortable within the marble walls and polished floors. The far end of the great room was dominated by a wall of giant smart screens, currently dark, waiting for the command to spring to life, to burst with data from around the globe to counter any threat. And before the wall of would-be global communication stood an imposing mahogany desk atop a platform emblazoned with the crest of the Oval Office.

As he crossed the floor and approached the nerve center, the man’s eyes were drawn behind the desk to the throne-like leather armchair which dominated the area facing a small TV broadcast station. A place for the king to sit in regal comfort as he commanded the peasants to ‘stay calm’.

Nick himself actually felt calm for the first time in a long while, as he lowered himself into the chair with a sense of rightness, of homecoming. It should have been him. Him to rule the world. To have the nations bow at his feet, to be the right hand of god. It would not have been enough but it would have been right.

With his hands spread across the desk and his back straight, Nick felt his rightness of purpose as he finally set about his true task. There was a discreet touch screen embedded in the mahogany surface of the desk. It lit with a single touch. Folders and programs opening before him with more simple little touches. The initiation sequence easy to enter once he had opened the Final Protocol.

A humorless smile graced his face as Nick hit the final key on the touchscreen keyboard. It really shouldn’t be this easy to hold the world in the palm of your hand.

 _I think it was You who led me here. Deep underground. To this old forgotten bunker. Its funny (not funny Ha Ha, there is no humor left in the world) but funny ironic, that the men who built this place might as well have left me a big red button in the middle of the desk. Easy to press. Because with a little motion, of one little finger, I will press ‘Enter’ and I will tear down what has taken millennia to build. I’m sure_ You _would see the humor in how easy we have made our own destruction._

_I think I will go outside and watch the dawn. Watch the world burn. Maybe at last I will feel warm._

It was casual, the way Nick pressed the Enter key, as if the action was of no consequence.

He didn’t turn in the chair to look back at the screens which flickered into life - a frantic countdown beginning as sirens blared. Instead he rose slowly from the splendor of the throne-like chair and strolled out of the opulent empty tomb. There was almost a spring in his step as he passed through the grey corridor and returned to the elevator, not seeing the smile reflected back on his face as he rose up through the mountain. Walking briskly out of the hanger and back into the open air, he sought a place with a good seat to take in this last view.


	3. CHAPTER 2- Then I Was Young And Unafraid

—o0o—  
  
**The Beginning of The End**

**Dean’s POV (time unknown)**

Nothing. It was all a vast Nothingness that filled the whole of eternity. But it wasn’t empty nothingness. There was more to the darkness than absence. The Nothing was a black so thick it had substance and weight. It crowded close, pressing in. Crushing him. The darkness was in the muffled pressure within his ears that blocked out the noise. It was in the oppressive weight on his eyes that caused him to imagine flashes of red. It lay within the constricting coils of smoke that wound about his limbs. He felt from it the press of formless hands and the slither of an invading touch. He tasted darkness in the acid despair that clogged his throat. Smelt the miasma of dread that permeated every cell in his body. It was inescapable. It was eternal. It was everything and nothing.

But sometimes, when he thought that he could take no more and he would finally go mad or die, the dark receded - not much but just enough - enough so that Dean could curl in on himself, hold tight and rock as he grasped at a sense of himself in the abyss. He could take his first full breath in what felt like years. Could feel his muscles allowed to shake with the strain. Feel the moisture escape from his tortured eyes.

He didn’t sleep then, there was no sleep in this place. He was exhausted and drained beyond hope, but there was no respite. The breathing space instead allowed his mind to drift and so he remembered.

—o0o—

_My life used to be easy, not that I knew it back then, stupid idiot that I was. Those days of summer when our life seemed to be one shitstorm after the next, but really the sun shone, occasionally Sammy cracked a smile and the open road rumbled beneath the tires of my Baby. We were so young, didn’t have a fucking clue, so full of hope - looking for Dad. Seemed like we were balanced on the edge but we were just pressured not fucking crushed.  Our Choice. Our Road. Saving people. Hunting things. The Family business._

_The things we’d do for a laugh. There was this one time I loaded Sammy’s boxers with itching powder. Ha. The little bitch super glued my hand to a beer bottle in revenge. I would say the most obnoxious shit I could think of and he would call me an idiot while trying not to laugh. Stupid kid - with his stupid hair in his stupid eyes, and those dimples the girls couldn’t get enough of, not once he grew into those shoulders anyway. I used to have loads more stories of them early days. But yeah 40 years in Hell takes its toll. Plus a lifetime of Monster and Demon shit don’t help neither. And this place? Its fucking lucky I remember my own name._

_Our world was so small. My Baby. Some fugly wallpaper in any of a thousand no-name motels. No junkless Angels or SonofaBitch demons. Just a job that could be solved at the end of a gun or a blade. Just my brother to watch out for. An’ he always had my back._

_Couldn’t last though, could it? Some dumbass had to go and start the fucking Apocalypse -  who was that again? Oh yeah - Me. Then Lucifer and Michael started crowding in on the action with their asshat plans. Alluva sudden it’s all Angels and Demons, the First Curse and God’s fucking Sister - stuff way beyond our control. The whole goddamn world just got too big. It chewed us up and spit us out. We were just us. What were we supposed to do against that sort of clusterfuck?_

_I mean we did it. Saved the fucking world. Somehow. Over and over again. Fueled by alcohol and pigheaded Winchester determination. Shoved both the Devil and Michael into the cage, got rid of the First Curse, sent God and his Sister on a nice family vacation. Even got Mom back and adopted Jack. We won! Kinda. (We had a few demon and soulless rampages, a couple of stints in hell or purgatory but that’s just our fucking life - ya know?!)_

_It should’ve been smooth sailing after that but can’t really say I’m surprised that it wasn’t. Fate fucking hates us. But we persevered. (Big word huh - where is Sammy when you need him?) Me and Sam, and Cas and Jack. We never gave up. No matter how many times we got kicked in the teeth, how many times them SonsaBitches beat us down, or how many mistakes that we made. We were always there to pick each other back up. To soldier on._

_Stupid, goddamn, fucking idiots - the lot of us._

—o0o—

Alone in the blackness Dean pressed his face to his knees shoring up his ragged strength, his arms fruitlessly trying to form a barrier against the dark. A frustrated growl slipped past his gritted teeth. The golden days of summer that he had been trying to cling to had slipped away from his thoughts like water down a drain.

He was back at Hitomi Plaza in Kansas City. “ _Impossible odds, feels like home.” I’m a stupid cocky bastard. We knew it was a trap. We knew that it could all go wrong. But we thought that we would grit our teeth and battle on like we always did. We marched into that trap like it was a damn parade._

The picture of Michael dragging an unconscious Cas into the penthouse office played on repeat through his mind.  
It was followed by the image of Michael waving one hand and Jack and Sam crumpling to the floor like puppets with cut strings.

That vessel had dodged every thrust and swipe of Dean’s Spear. Moving with a lithe inhuman grace that should not have been possible. The calm confident power she had radiated as she planted a booted heel into his chest and sent him crashing into the floor, the spear spinning from his hand. Dean had gotten up and rejoined the fight. (Of course he had.) And as her hand had cut off the air in his throat, her voice had whispered in his ear:

“Don’t forget, you let me in.”

A klaxon, a siren, warning bells hung on a fucking marching band - had screamed in his mind. He should have listened. Should have turned tail and ran, retreated and regrouped - whatever you wanna call it. But Dean Winchester was nothing if not pig headed. _“Impossible odds.”_ He had said _. The last-minute Hail Mary. That was their thing right?_

He had fought back and it had started to happen. That impossible win. That last minute turn-around. Sam catching up the spear and throwing it to his hand like the well oiled machine that they were. Him rolling smoothly to his feet and scoring a strike against Michael while the archangel was still busy basking in success. The cusp - the tipping point. The first ray of hope.

But Michael had straightened. Surprise slipping away from the vessel’s face like a mask dropped to the floor.

Reality had shivered as their eyes met. Human to Archangel. Electric wings in the dark. The fire that burns like ice. Cold like the blast of a supernova had flooded Dean’s veins and burst from his eyes. He had felt a sense of falling as his body seemed to get further and further away from his mind.

Clawing, grasping, he had tried to hold on as the void sucked him down. And from the bottom of a long dark tunnel he had watched as his own hands snapped the spear in two and cast it aside. The gravelly sounds of his vocal chords moving without his command as Michael retook control of the true vessel and used Dean’s own body to taunt his family.

“So I left but not without leaving the door open just a crack.” ( _No, you fucking son of a bitch, no._ ) Guilt had choked him. He had been a Trojan, a spy in their midst this whole time.

Michael had laughed, playing to both audiences, as Cas demanded to know why. And the archangel had been speaking to Dean too as he answered out loud. “To break him. To crush and disappoint him... so completely... that this time... he will be nice and quiet for a change. Buried. And he is. He’s gone.”

Dean had screamed in response. _No he isn’t you mother fucker. I’m not gonna give up. You hear me you bastard? I’m gonna fight you every fucking step of the way._

“Oh but Dean…” Michael had replied only to him, his voice echoing in the cavern of Dean’s mind. “You misunderstand. This place…? It isn’t... your prison. This is me... graciously... allowing you one last glimpse of your family. Front row seats.

I keep telling you. I Am. The One. In Command. So sit back... and enjoy the show… for now.”

 **Snap.**  
  
_The fucking peacock had changed his freaking clothes. Who the fuck stops in the middle of world domination for a fucking wardrobe change_? If there had been anything even remotely funny about this, Dean would have laughed.

Instead he had watched helplessly as with a wave of Dean’s hand; Sam, Cas and Jack had once more crashed to the floor, their faces distorted with pain. Michael laughing contemptuously as hope died. “I see everything. I know everything. And now I have my perfect vessel. I have destroyed the one weapon, that could hurt me. All that remains is for me to remove the one being with the potential to stand against me.”

Another snap… and Jack had been gone. Just like that. Gone.

“No!” Dean remembered the desperation in Cas’ roar as the Seraph had surged to his feet, ignoring his injuries and pain, to charge the Archangel. But Michael had just halted the advance with one hand to Cas’ throat. An admonishment - as if for a naughty child - falling from his lips as he’d casually tossed Cas aside.

From his place on the floor, Sam had pulled out their backup plan, (atta boy Sammy, always with the plan B) and pitched the holy oil Molotov right at Dean… at Michael. Dean would have welcomed the pain, forgiven Sam for any torment if it had stopped the bastard. For the briefest second Dean felt hope but the wave of their arm which had deflected the projectile had been bored.

“Really?” Disdain filled Michael’s words in Dean’s voice (the cadence fucked six ways from Sunday.) “What part of: ‘I have won’, is too difficult, for you apes, to comprehend?”

“You see Dean.” Michael’s voice had echoed in the dark, loud enough to cover Dean’s swearing. “You can struggle all you like. You are but a gnat before the flames of the sun. It will always end the same way. The only way it could. I always win. Let me show you how futile your struggling really is.”

And the last sight Dean had seen of the real world was the sight of his brother and his angel once more pinned to the floor as the doors to the office bust open. A pack of feral monsters surging in.  Over the cacophony of roars and growls Michael had raised his voice one last time.

“Feel free to enjoy the… entertainment. But if you will excuse me… I have work to do.”

—o0o—

The breathing space of his memories was gone once again. The images he had clung to for comfort and torment already fading under the pressure of the dark.

Once again the choking suffocating blackness roiled and surged over him like an ocean. Drowning him. Leaving him nothing but his fear, despair and a stubborn refusal to give in. Was there ever anything else? He didn’t know any more. He had no concept of how long this had been his existence. For Eternity?

Dean missed Hell. Hell had light and pain and an adversary you could see and hear and feel. Time was fuzzy there but at least there was something by which you could mark its passing even if just the change of pain. Time had no measure in the dark. The nightmare was unending. The only idea Dean had of time’s passing was the decaying remnants of his strength as it drained away like sands from a broken hourglass.

The black crept and crawled and slithered up his body, into his eyes and ears and mouth. He struggled hard as his remaining strength allowed but despite the contradiction of his confinement there was nothing to fight, nothing to punch or kick. The dark was formless and void even as it crushed him. How could you fight shadows?

His muffled cries of defiance were weaker than his last. Pure stubbornness was the fuel that he refused to give up. But for how much longer he could hold out he could not even guess.

_I don't know if I can do this._

Once more he strained to draw air into his chest. Through the thick sludge of darkness he called out to them, his last remaining shred of hope - though his voice was raw and the foul blackness clogged his throat.

“Sammmmyyyyyyyy?! Caaassssssssss?! Jaaaacccckkk!”

As usual there was no answer and no one came.

_They will never come. They are dead and this is my Hell._


	4. CHAPTER 3  - And Dreams Were Made And Used And Wasted

—o0o—

**The Present Day**

**Sam’s POV**

Fitful light coughed and spat from small flames clinging to stunted twigs in a makeshift fire pit. The slight glow and meager heat from the fire offered little comfort and the shifting light cast ominous shadow across the weathered face of the lean hunter. His broad shoulders were hunched to draw his tall frame closer to the warmth. A heavy leather jacket, scarred with time and use, old even before he had started wearing it, did what it could to blanket him and hide a shirt stiff with weeks of grime.

The man lifted weary fingers, pushing back too long hair, before he ran his hand down his heavy brow and prominent cheekbones to his sharp jaw. The movement was accompanied by the rasp of several months of scraggly beard lining his hollow cheeks. He shook his head as he blinked tired hazel eyes.

The abandoned barn he had chosen for this night’s shelter had seen better days - like everything else in this ravaged world - its roof sagged violently in places, but it offered at least some protection from the ever present winds and bitter cold.

The structure was large enough to hide the car and the horse stalls at the rear of the barn away from the main doors, provided a snug little room to shield the light and warmth from his small fire. But still the shrilling of the wind found its way into the space; a haunted song that twisted and tumbled through the multitude of holes in wooden boards of the walls.

Small though it was, he had surrounded his fire with salvaged lengths of old particleboard, rooted out from debris at the back of the barn. The boards protected the flames from the fitful winds, created a shield to trap in the heat and prevented the glow from illuminating the whole structure. It was a long established routine for him in a time when fuel was scarce and fires kept small, where heat meant life but the light from that same flame also attracted death in the form of the creatures who walked the night without fear.

Sam had little to do this evening but sit in lonely silence and tend the flickering flames and this time of night always seemed never ending to the hunter. This night especially he felt every one of his 42 years of life (on this mortal plane at least). His knees ached stiffly, folded cross-legged on the cold wooden boards and an old wound in his left arm twinged and bit every time he fed a new twig into the flames. His back was a line of over-tight muscle as he hunched in on himself and the persistent ache in his heart was yet one more pain to be ignored.

There could be worse places to spend the night though. Less comfortable places. Here the smell of old hay and animal musk filled the air - a ghost scent clinging from a time long forgotten. The animals dead and gone, as dead as the people who had worked the land and built the barn, but it seemed that nothing in this world was ready to let go of a past that could never come again.

A click from his Geiger counter interrupted the hunter’s despondent vigil and drew his fox slanted eyes from the flames to the noise. The small battered box lay propped up on top of his equally worn pack but despite the wear and tear he had kept it well maintained and it faithfully reported its readings.

The click didn’t repeat, the needle once more settled in its dial. Just a stray gust of background radiation, nothing to worry about, but Sam’s mind was already running through his calculations as he reached into his jacket pocket and opened his map. The wind had been coming from the west this evening. He steadied the paper across his knees, angling the worn parchment to the faint firelight. Red felt tip pen in his neat, efficient handwriting annotated the map with Radiation Hot Zones. Facts and figures tumbled through his mind, a granite hard frown on his face as he calculated terrain, elevation, and wind speed and direction.

He huffed a long sigh and let his shoulders relax as he reached the most likely conclusion putting aside several alternatives. He would be safe enough tonight if the wind held its course, but if it shifted to the northwest he would take the Impala and head south on the old highway. The hunter had long since outfitted the old car with air filters and shielding. She looked more like a tank these days than a car. He had even converted her to run on practically anything flammable. Dean would have been horrified.

Sam stuttered to a halt at the name he hadn’t meant to think. With an angry shake of the head to reset his thoughts, the hunter instead reached long fingers across the old pack and withdrew a blue marker from the front pocket.

On his map he marked off the deserted settlement he had found that morning several miles north. An X marking the site as looted and of no further interest. He placed a question mark against the next town 5 miles southeast from this barn. Whatever had cleared the makeshift settlements had been recent. A few months at most. It could have been bandits (people crazy or desperate enough to leave the questionable shelter of an encampment and roam the wilds in search of prey) but more likely it was non-human. But either would move on and pick clean nearby settlements, it was almost certain he would find more destruction tomorrow.

Absently he tapped his pen against his chin, eyes scanning the map as he considered what he knew. Not wooded enough for Wendigo, not enough prey for Vamps, too cold for Vetalas, (it was always winter thanks to the nuclear fallout that poisoned the air, but there were still warmer places to hunt than the open plains.)

Sam thought about that destroyed settlement - not as picked clean as it could have been. So it probably wasn’t any of the more human monsters interested in supplies. There had been a lot of bodies left decaying on the road - so nothing that ate flesh... unless they were picky eaters. He would need to find a recent kill. There was only so much you could learn from a month old corpse left exposed to the elements, especially in a place and time where dozens of opportunists will happily take a snack from easy carrion. What he wouldn't give for a well stocked morgue, a body on ice and a helpful ME with pre-typed notes.

His sigh was dry and quiet as Sam finally hoisted himself to his feet and stretched long tired limbs. His thoughts were melancholy this night. So he folded and slipped the map back inside his jacket pocket along with the pen and rolling his neck to release the tension in his shoulders he turned and left the stall.

Heavy boots silent, he paced like a jungle cat to the barn door and eased it open a crack to peer into the dark. It took a few seconds for his eyes to adjust but nothing caught his gaze. Never unarmed, his machete hung at his belt, lightly cradled by a deceptively loose hand, ready should anything appear. Nothing did. The night would have been silent if not wind that wailed like the dead.

The wind caught the almost invisible clouds of vapor from his parted lips and whisked them away into the cold night as he breathed slow and steady.

Beneath the wind, the ghosts were loud this night; their wailing cries of outrage and sorrow competing with the gale. Souls that had lived in paradise but now found themselves confused and alone in hell. He wasn’t surprised that they screamed. Sometimes he wished he could join them. Howl out his pain to the void.

Sam huffed out his disgust before pinching his lips tight closed. A muscle ticking in his jaw. His brain just wouldn’t stop tonight. Usually he had better discipline. What would be the point of him howling? One more scream in this world would make no difference. Other than to make himself a target.

He absently rubbed his aching chest with the hand not resting on his blade. There was no room left in him for self pity. He didn’t have time for such things, so instead he resolutely returned his scrutiny to the night. Still undisturbed, he detected no glint of unnatural eyes. Saw no unusual movement in the dark weeds that were once corn fields. Smelt no sulfur or corruption. Heard no growls or screams that wasn’t lost souls or the wind. The hair on the back of his neck remained lax.

He was alone. With a last sigh he pulled shut the door, turned away from the night and returned to his fire.

—o0o—

It was late or early depending on how you looked at it.

The fire had sunk to embers and the hunter was laid fully clothed along the stall wall, his head on his pack and his knife in his hand. He listened to the shadows that crowded the corners. Sleep did not come easily to him. Gone were the days when he could slumber securely to the steady sound of another breathing just 4 feet away or in the silent presence of an Angel standing guard. The days when he had been assured in the knowledge that the doors and windows were warded and should anything make it in, they would meet two brothers standing tall, back to back, protected by an Angel of the Lord with eyes of burning blue and all the righteous wrath of heaven in his hands. A time when they hadn’t known that they lived the dream and that their small joys were not to be wasted.

No. Sleep was no longer his friend, but exhausted and wound tight, the hunter -not really awake but not fully asleep - still slipped into the uneasy dreams.

—o0o—

_It’s like I’m standing at a crossroads… no it’s not roads... it’s a tree. And I’m not standing, I’m laying at the base of it looking up. And that tree is my life and all the lives that have touched mine. Spread out like branches and twigs that cover the sky. Thousands of converging pathways and decisions, merging and flowing together to bring me to this point. There should be a pattern, some logic or formula that should dictate why that branch meets that one, why at that point. Why this other branch misses it entirely but joins later on. But as hard as I look I can’t see the pattern. I know it’s there, even things that look random are governed by the laws of physics and nature. It’s just…. there are too many variables, too many outside influences, too many unknowns. How am I supposed to calculate the answer of what will happen next, when information to be loaded into the equation is not just the sum of one life but a hundred, a thousand, other lives that touched it too?_

_And now it’s raining…. or at least there is water in my eyes. I think it’s rain. I should blink. I need to be able to see. I just need to keep studying the details until I properly understand it. Why can’t I see?_

_-_

_Her hair is blonde. Which is a stupid thought because of course her hair is blond and her smile is wide and bright and her eyes are blue. And I didn’t tell her. I mean she wouldn’t have believed me. She would have told me I was studying too hard and putting too much pressure on myself not to fail. Or that repressed childhood fears were trying to find an outlet in my dreams. Or any of the other sane reasons why a person dreams of a loved one dying. But I still should have told her. Warned her. Did I set her on that path or was she already locked into it by Fate? A series of actions that culminate in fire and death and smoke and hands holding me back, pulling me away. Now there is smoke in my eyes. Why can’t I see?_

_-_

_I’m standing on an empty road and an old sign reads that the convent is just 2 miles on and the night is dark. Like the sound track to a bad horror movie the muffled cries of a woman drift from the closed trunk of the car. Bitter words ring in my ears and all I can see is the blank phone screen clenched in my hand._ She _stands behind me, I can feel the pressure from her to make my decision. I can’t think. I want to be calm and collected. I need to make the right choice. To choose the right paths. But all I can hear are bitter words in my ears and the road ahead is dark. Why can’t I see?_

_-_

_I fall. I take back control and allow myself to fall. The torment that comes after is too much. Are there clues here that I have missed? It’s a part of my path…. but this pain is more than I can sift through.. Why can’t I see?_

_-_

_She’s dead. It’s my fault and I know it’s my fault. We had a goal, we had a plan. There were risks. Of course there are always risks. But the goal was worth the risks…._ that _goal is always worth the risks. But I didn’t want that. Not her. I will carry that always…. but would I change it if I knew then what I know now? I want to say ‘yes’, but my words are a lie. Because I left the Book of The Damned in the hands of a Witch and again I stopped at nothing. I had to do this._

 _We will deal with the consequences, just first let me save_ him _for a change. The magic stabs like lightning from the sky and the flash seers my eyes. I feel unimaginable relief that the Mark is gone, knowing he is free, but Darkness is waiting at the edges and the world is flooded in blackness. Why can’t I see?_

_-_

_It’s not him. I know that. I know the exact degree of horror it is to watch your own hands move to someone else’s purpose. I know the betrayal of your own body that’s no longer yours to command. The sense of failure to not even be able save yourself. I look into eyes that I know better than I know my own, and it’s not him. The rhythm of his voice is wrong. His stance is too rigid. All his passion and rage, cocksure attitude and intense focus are covered by a cold detachment that sits unnaturally on his face. It’s not him._

_The holy oil. The spear. Enochian handcuffs. One Seraph. One Nephilim. Me. And one hostage hunter. Our assets flash through my mind in quick succession. Potential actions and reactions. Plans made and discarded even as I feel my body crash to the floor as pain floods my core. I know pain. It doesn’t stop my mind from turning. From watching, from waiting for a moment of opportunity. But our every action is anticipated and countered, I can’t get ahead of him. And then he is gone, and Jack too. And I wasn’t able to stop it._

_I have his hybrid monsters to deal with first. Get out of this with Cas and then make a plan. We’ll get him back… get them back. I just need to find a new plan to defeat an archangel. There must be a way I haven’t found yet. Why can’t I see?_

_-_

_Maggie is dead. This pattern I can see. This pattern became clear to me a long time ago. Love me or get too close to me and you die. A trail of death stretching back behind me like bread crumbs. What I can’t see is how to break that pattern…. except to remove myself from the board… but I can’t … not just yet. There is no one else to save him… save them. I will find a way. I have to. Cas will see to the remaining hunters, deal with the monsters. Better if I do this alone. Fix my mistakes without endangering anyone else._

_I was thinking about it all wrong. It’s not power you need to defeat an Archangel, it’s cunning. I have a lead on the Alpha Djinn. Cas stumbled across their Queen while searching for the Tree of Life. She would have the ability to rewrite reality, not needing to overpower an archangel but able to change reality around one, maybe trap it. This could hold the answer. I could ask Cas to help, technically he married her…. No. It’s better that I do this alone. I won’t necessarily ask nicely. This, he won’t want to see._

_-_

_The Djinn lead was a bust - their Alpha Queen already dead, but I refused to give up._

_Cas left. Said I was chasing shadows and there were others he could save. Begged me to stop, to look at myself, to come with him. I didn’t listen, all I felt was anger and betrayal. I didn’t want to see._

_The hunters died one by one. But how do you choose between a recent sighting of Michael and the endless swarm of monsters. No point fighting a fire if you don’t tackle it’s source. I didn’t want to see._

_Out there food became scarce but the bunker was well stocked. There were other sources of information, I just needed to keep digging, to be the one to stop this all. I didn’t need to see._

_Then the lights turned red and the bunker locked down and for the first time I looked up, and all I could see was death. And I felt something within me irrevocably break. And the billion frantic equations spinning through my mind froze and tumbled to the floor. I had let the world burn. Once again I had been too busy following my plan, so sure_ I _would find the answers, but instead I had destroyed the whole world. Again._

_And I closed my eyes. It was too much to see._

_-_

_I don’t know what happens next. The tree and its branches are burned to ash. Now I stand alone in a smoking crater surrounded by death and ruin. It’s all gone….. He’s gone._

_And for a long time I did nothing, I wasn’t able to do anything else. But then one day I started moving. So now I move. I move because if I stopped moving I would lay down and never get back up. But I’m not looking. There is no point in looking for answers when the equation lays in ruins. There is no point in making plans that never stand a chance. I just… move…. because that’s all that is left._

_Dean…. he…. once told me about purgatory. How it felt pure. No thought, just instinct and motion. I didn’t understand him then, not really, but I think I do now. This place isn’t pure. I carry my demons and they haunt me. But it’s only my past. I’ve put down the weight of my future. We are all dead, one way or another. It’s only a matter of time._

_I don’t try to see any more. There is no need to ‘look’, when you ‘know’._

—o0o—

The sound of scraping wood snapped open the hunters eyes, uneasy dreams blown away in an instant. The barn door rattled against the wedge he had hammered under it before he lay down to sleep. It wasn’t the wind.

On the back of his neck, Sam’s hair stood to attention as the instinct honed in a thousand hunts told him this was no bodiless spirit or wild animal. He rose soundlessly to his feet - just one more shadow in the night - the long blade a whisper as it left the sheath at his side. Movements like poured silk across smooth steel, he slipped from the protection of the horse stall and across the open floor of the barn skirting the car.

A vampire pushed at the splintered remains of the wooden doors, eyes shining unnaturally in the dark. The barest glint of cloud defused moonlight illuminated a mouth stuffed with needle teeth. He could hear it sniffing as it craned it’s head into the building, searching for the source of the wood smoke lost in the old scents of hay and manure - tilting its ears to catch the steady heartbeat of its prey.

The creature became aware of the man in the shadows at the same time the knife whistled through the air. A sure swing of a muscled arm driving the blade clean through its neck.

Time stopped. The creature didn’t cry out, it just stared surprised, mouth gaping. Then with a launch the world moved on.  The thud of a skull bouncing off the floorboards was swiftly echoed by the crash of a body crumpling to the floor. The scent of sour blood wafted bright through the air as arterial spray painted the rafters.

The hunter didn’t know that he smiled, a small joyless grimace, as he loomed over the settling body, his fist working the handle of the bloody blade. His eyes scanning the gloomy interior, as his ears strained against the howl of the wind, seeking more prey.

A coughing grumble and a skitter of stones told him that his work for the night was not done. So he rolled his neck once more and loosened his shoulders as the blade rose in his fist and his stance dropped into a ready coil. They could be arrogant, these creatures who think they own the night, thinking that they have nothing to fear.

He would teach them otherwise.

His cold grin became wider as four more vampires pushed through the ruined door. There was no joy in his heart, but this night the blood on his hands would belong to those who deserved it. He was death in motion.

What else was there?


	5. CHAPTER 4 - As They Tear Your Hopes Appart, As They Turn Your Dreams To Shame

—o0o—

**Present Day**

**Cas’ POV**

Sunshine used to bathe this place in a persistent warmth that never faltered. A golden breeze would carry the scents of ripe apples and rich hay. The chiming peals of laughter from small children would sing on the breeze as they scurried in endless games of chase. The sweet trill of bird song would fill the honeyed afternoon light as the sapphire blue sky was kissed with the yellows, roses and purples of dusk. He would walk in this place with his vast wings outstretched, basking in its glory - joy flooding his core and renewing his grace.

Now his wings drag behind him in the dirt, broken and scarred, and his grace is a dim tarnished thing barely brighter than the meanest human soul. Even his coat is tattered and torn - that which once he remade with just a thought, is now a ragged reminder of how much has been lost. Like the face of his vessel once young and unchanging now tired and stubbled and lined with grief.

The world he loved is gone and the halls of Heaven are empty and barren.

-

Weight bowed the Angel’s shoulders like the press of unwanted time upon an old forgotten relative. His footsteps echoed as they imposed their lonely sound on the empty halls. His limbs dragged against the weight of sorrow and despair as he walked ever onwards. There was no logical reason why he had come to trudge through old memories better left undisturbed.

Cas frowned to himself at the thought. Was he human enough now to torture himself? To prod at a bruise just to be reminded of the pain? Or did he still carry some ill conceived thought that he would find… something? Some remnant, some tiny shard of hope?

Hope had left him long ago.

These thoughts were a stark reminder of how mortal he had become. There had been a time when ‘long ago’ was the day the first fish crept out of the ocean, the days when the apes first learned to use fire, when the great kings of Egypt raised their pointed tombs to defy the gods. Now he called ‘long ago’ a mere six years. Not even a full human lifetime. Six brief years that should be just a blink of an eye, yet the weight of that short time sat more heavily on him than all the long millennia he had known. It was such a human thing. An angel in all its glory and serenity of purpose does not feel the passage of time, but a human with its short bright life, clings ever so tightly to every precious minute. To the all consuming joy that it feels in the taste of good food, the warmth of another's arms, in the unbridled joy of true laughter.

In the time since he had raised one bright soul from Perdition, the Angel had come to know such human joys, to really feel them. And then for these comforts to be swept away in these 6 short years… it left the angel feeling human as it counted every slow second that ticked by. Each and every moment underscored with the persistent lament that echoed through his mind: _Gone. All gone. Because of me, because I failed. Because I couldn't save them. None of them._

_Once I led armies. I was the perfect Warrior of God, the obedient and diligent soldier - I rained fire and destruction on the unholy. I commanded the garrisons of heaven. I knew only peace and contentment in the fulfillment of my duties. I never knew pain or worry or doubt. I was an Angel of The Lord._

_I changed that day I took hold of a battered and tarnished soul and raised it from the depths of perdition. And I saw how it shone in the face of adversity. I saw how it refused to be broken or beaten down by the horror it suffered. Nothing I had seen in my many years before or since has been more beautiful to me. I saw that bright soul grow only stronger with the support of another which I - at the time - considered an abomination. Until at last I saw how that other soul shone just as bright - despite its wounds and its stains, it was beautiful because it never gave in. And in that single moment I found a new calling. The greatest of blasphemies - I had found a new God. Purpose, love, humanity - encapsulated in two imperfectly perfect souls who refused to give in. And I did the unthinkable, I - the unswerving servant of the Most High - I renounced my heaven and my absent father and I swore my immortal being in its entirety to him… to them. A lowly man named Dean and his brother named Sam. How could I have known then what they would teach me, show me, the mistakes that I would make along the way? The lessons I’d learn and the love I would gain - until at last they would lead me to the son of my heart. To the Nephilim boy named Jack, the child of the Morning Star who could have destroyed this world but instead fought to save it._

_Jack. Dean. And Sam. My family. A word I had never truly understood before then._

_And I failed them. As I failed my long lost brethren; angels I had communed with since the dawn of time, left behind in their heaven, only waiting to be shown the right way. Though I’m sure they no longer considered me in their number, they were still my brothers and sisters. One day I would have returned here to Heaven to show them the light, the new path, this time without hubris or punishment. But as I stand in these ruined halls,  I know I will never get that chance and I know that I failed them all too..._

_So few had remained when Michael slaughtered the last of my brothers and sisters. When he strode into these halls without opposition and tore through the tattered remnants like a tidal wave, crushing their grace beneath his heal. The walls and floors were branded black with the soot of scorched wings. The only time such destruction had been seen before was when a foolish fallen angel thought to take the place of God._

_I would love to blame Michael for the death of Heaven, but it was I who first decimated our ranks. It was I who first broke our wings and cast us down upon the earth. It was I who was too busy searching for my stolen friend and my son, that too late did I turn my gaze towards heaven, too late did I arrive to save them._

_Though I wish it were otherwise, I cannot blame Michael that Heaven crumbled like the last gasp of a dying human and fell like wasted tears on barren ground. That the billions of souls that had known only comfort and joy in their bubbles of paradise were cast down to the veil. That the veil ripped and shredded like tissue before a tsunami and the world was flooded with the broken and lost; food for every demon greedy to snatch up fresh souls._

_It would give me some small joy to blame Michael for that sin, but that lie is not within me._

_So it is my penance to do what I can to fight the demons - to try to safeguard the souls that should have been in our care. The demons are legion and their numbers grow with every soul they claim and twist. They increase faster than any one angel could ever hope to counter._

_I hold no hope. This penance I will also fail. There is a flood coming. One that will utterly destroy what is left of this land. And when all the souls of Heaven serve Hell, all hope will be gone. When the only things left are demons and monsters, humankind will be forever lost._

_This I know with the same certainty that I know all my failures. But what more can I do? I am just one._

—o0o—

The once-Angel pushed his way through the unguarded portal and stumbled into the sandbox that stood abandoned in the grey human world. With no grace left to power it, the magic was leaching away, soon no way would remain to access the barren halls above.

Around the dying portal the rusted frames of the children's playground leaned drunkenly in their ruin. A smear of old blood stained the bottom of the slide.

The washed out grey of the day drew all heat from the air. Nothing stirred but the wind in what once had been a place of joy and laughter. It was a sad echo on earth of the ruin in heaven.

There was nothing for him here.

There remained about an hour’s worth of light before dusk. He would need to move quickly if he wished to escape the city outskirts. Not that monsters and demons feared the day any more; humans died just as easily in the light as they did in the dark. But the dark was still evil’s natural habitat, where their senses gave them the most advantage over their prey.

Old population centers were prime targets for scavengers and so meant fresh meat for the monsters. The ruined buildings provided perfect cover for anything that stalked its kills. There would be enough fighting to do this night; he did not wish to be needlessly wearied by battling his way out of the city first.

So Castiel left the playground. Keeping to the meridian of the roads strewn with abandoned and rusting vehicles, he stepped with confidence but made no undue noise. His movements were calm and purposeful as he strode the silent streets - overshadowed by looming buildings of grey concrete which were choked in bitter weeds and slowly wept debris as they slumped in on themselves. Nameless things rustled in the shadows of dark corners but he gave them no attention as he walked on.

After a half hour of traveling down the twisting streets the hacking cough of a mangy dog broke the quiet as it died in an ally - dogs made good eating for many but this one’s flesh was too ravaged by radiation to be worth a scavengers trouble. The Angel didn’t stop to investigate. He had just enough grace left to withstand the cold weather and the radiation, to stride through a broken city as if he knew no fear. He certainly didn’t have enough grace left to worry about a dying dog; the dying could fend for themselves.

Cas pondered his grace as the industrial streets slowly changed to abandoned suburbs. Like the portal to heaven, his grace was a pitiful pale thing that leached away day by day. When it was gone so too would he be. Humans stood little chance in this new world. But until that day though, he would do what he could. In this case it meant walking, so on he walked.

—o0o—

The road had left the old suburbs and crossed into what had once been farmlands but now was just mud, stone and poisonous weeds. Barren fields covered the horizon by the time the Angel walked through the gathering dusk, the city a dark smudge on the horizon behind him. The once orange glow of streetlights, the neon buzz of commerce with the red and white bustle of traffic and life - now nothing more than a darker stain of black against a lifeless sea of waste.

He did not look back.

There was a monastery another 8 miles further on into the wasteland. Its bells were long silent and its halls were picked clean. The bones of its monks lay scattered where they fell. If his Father had ever walked it’s halls He hadn’t done so in centuries.

The angel tried not to think of his Father. The Father who had forsaken His children. Who would offer no comfort in His holy places. Regardless, it was not sanctuary that Castiel would seek in the monastery this night. Instead he sought the lost souls that would be drawn there in vain hope of refuge.

In places where the souls lost from heaven congregated there soon came demons. It was an ‘all you can eat buffet’ (as Dean would have said) and the demons are gluttonists.

In a few more years the earth would literally become Hell. When the number of tortured and twisted souls claimed by the demon hoards outweighed the remaining living. When the scales of this world fell towards evil and nothing remained to balance it with good.

Not that one poor excuse for an angel could stem that tide. But this was why it was his ‘penance’ not his ‘mission’. He did not expect to prevail. He did not expect to survive.

So he walked the lonely road in the dark, heading towards a fight he knew he could not win. The sad shape that his mouth formed was not a smile. It was a bitter twist as he remembered a long lost friend who had always enjoyed impossible odds.

—o0o—

It was sometime later when movement on the road ahead caught the being’s attention. He was almost to his night’s destination and he was alert for disturbances. The Angel’s eyes were still sharper than a humans and Cas’ gaze easily pierced the gloom catching the shape of a child ambling towards him on the side of the road.

He did not rush to offer it assistance. In this time and place no child ambled alone on the side of the road, after dark or otherwise. Instead a silver blade slid from the sleeve of his tattered coat and landed securely in his strong grasp.

The angel blade was a manifestation of his grace and it tugged at his weakened core to call it forth. But he was a warrior first and foremost, he would drift into dust before the blade failed to come to his call. He stood ready for the fight.

The once-human child kept its easy pace, it skipped towards the Angel as if the sun shone and the bees were making honey. Its once blond curls were plastered in mud. Thick black veins covered its neck and face - explaining why it appeared happy in its tattered pink dress and bare feet. The child had fallen to Croatoan. (A vicious new strain which Michael had released along with his hoard of new-and-improved monsters.) These new Croatoans didn't die from starvation or burn out once their vessel was consumed - they just killed and ate and ate and killed, on and on, spreading their plague wherever they went. The infection rate was lower than the first version (most all those infected died before the conversation took hold) but it was twice as hard to eliminate those who did turn.

However, the thing approaching did not expect its prey this night to be an angel. It expected screams of terror and running and bleeding. What it saw instead was a man waiting calmly at the side of the road, his hand hidden in a wind whipped coat, a dirty tie fluttering like a banner in the night, and blue eyes that seem to catch nonexistent light as if some tiny spark glowed within them.

The creature screamed almost gleefully as it charged. It felt mostly puzzled then, when it was suddenly halted by a blade that pierced its heart - its legs collapsing underneath it, as flashes of lightning sparked from the metal skewering it. This was not what it had anticipated. Confusion flooded its mind as it tasted its own blood filling its mouth, and the world began to go dark.

The kill was swift, the whole confrontation taking only seconds. There was no fight, the creature too surprised to react. Castiel guessed he should be thankful for that and maybe sorry for the once human child.

But he wasn't. Thankful or sorry. There was little in this world to be thankful for and far too much else to be sorry for. His sorrow was reserved for his bigger failures.

The angel didn’t bury the child. After he had made sure it was dead,  he put away his blade and resumed walking. He left it where it had fallen at the side of the road. The night was moving on and he needed to help those who most needed his help. An empty body meant meat to attract ghouls but few enough people lived out here that he was more concerned with his mission and the souls of the dead.

He traveled on without looking back, and as he did Castiel silently prayed to an absent Father, whom he knew was not listening, that the souls he sought to save this night would be spared from a hell they did not deserve. There was no answer to his prayer. He didn’t expect one.

He was not yet to the monastery when the first demons begin to rise from the ground like plumes of ash from a volcano.


	6. CHAPTER 5 - But There Are Dreams That Cannot Be

—o0o—

**The Present Day**

**Jack’s POV**

_Sometimes the darkness parts or kind of thins enough that I can see pictures. It’s like an old blurry movie on a television. Sometimes the pictures flash by too quickly and it doesn't make any sense. Other times it’s more like watching a whole episode of a show, only its one I've never seen and I don't know any of the characters._

_I don't really understand what is happening.  I know that I am watching television… probably.... maybe? But where am I watching television and why? I don't know anything… I don’t even know who I am let alone why this is happening._

_Thinking is hard. And I have this strange feeling. Like there is something I have forgotten. But my head feels sorta stuffy, like my thoughts are all covered in syrup. Everything in my brain feels like it is too far away for me to reach. And I want to reach.. but it's just easier… not to._

_But the pictures keep on playing… so I watch._

—o0o—

The darkness swirls and an image resolves. There are people working in a small fortified shanty town. The grey dust covers their makeshift shelters cobbled together from old scraps. The pathways between the rickety huts are clogged in mud and the people who wander them are dressed in clothes that are stained and torn. Some of them look sick or probably dying. They are clustered together in the shelters but there are no doctors or medicines to help them. They struggle to breath and cough blood into shaking hands.

Night after night werewolves come to their walls of broken cars and piled up rubbish. The monsters howl and scream from outside. The men and women able to stand and fight scramble up the defenses and fire old rusty guns and homemade arrows into the dark. It does little good. The werewolves are playing with their food. They take one or two of the fighters each night, pulling them screaming from the walls, feasting in plain view. It ensures that the camp people have vivid red horrors to replay in their minds once the monsters retire for the day.

The dwindling number of humans spend the days re-patching their walls and crouching in the dust within shelters that are not enough. They have no food, no fuel for their broken vehicles. They are running out of bullets and arrows. There is no way out. There is no hope.

Darkness closes in.

—o0o—

Time passes before a new image appears. This one seems like it might be familiar.

It is the ghost of a woman, once a hunter named Maggie. She roams the halls of a building. The art-deco tiled walls glint in cold light but the glow from down-turned lamps does little against the darkness that lurks in the corners. This place is lost and forgotten. There are rooms of boxes packed with arcane trinkets, rooms full of books and rooms with beds and abandoned personal belongings. But there are no other people, the building is shrouded in silence like a tomb.

The ghost drifts from room to room. Her mouth moves and her chest rises as she calls. She calls and calls and calls. Her voice the moaning of a wind which should not be heard in the buried heart of the building.

No one answers her but she doesn’t stop calling. Ever onwards she goes, her eyes searching the corners, her hands trailing insubstantially over dusty furniture.

But whatever she searches for, she doesn't find it. So she returns to the start of her path, begins her search again. Over and over and over. Tears mark her cheeks as she repeats her fruitless task, locked in death in a pattern she cannot break. And like the ghostly touch of her feet, her passing leaves no mark on the world. The darkness covers her from view.

—o0o—

The next picture should cause panic, but the thoughts still feel too distant. It is a young man lying chained in Enochian spelled shackles. His face is pale as he lies unconscious on a cold stone slab - its a face that is familiar.

The room he is in is small and featureless. Cold damp walls only feet from his prone body, the darkness crowding close. There is no door, it has been cemented shut. The passageway leading from the cellar prison has been collapsed. The building above it crumbled into a mountain of rubble that an army could not dig through. The desolate city surrounding it has been burned to the ground. It is a place of emptiness and isolation.

But the picture returns to the face of the sleeping boy... so familiar. Long pale lashes lay closed against full round cheeks. A sweep of blonde hair falling across one side of his brow. He does not breath or stir, there is no sign of life in the chamber bar the faintest glow of blue to the chains and the quietest beat of a heart.

The same noise that echoes throughout the darkness in which the movie pictures are playing.

_That is…..? Wait… I know that face… his name is….(why can't I think?!)... He’s…. I’m…_

_Is he me? Is that me? Then where am I?_

It's too hard. The syrup covered thoughts slip away. Whoever the boy is, there is no help for him here. Like a curtain descending the picture is cloaked in darkness, but somehow the echo of the heartbeat remains.

—o0o—

The final place that appears is not familiar. It is a tall rugged mountain range that looks out across a broken and ruined city in the basin below. A great fire burns in the distance where a nuclear power station has exploded filling the grey air with poison - though the radiation from the burn will make little difference to the dying land around, already drowned in the fallout from when the bombs first fell.

Upon the mountain range above it all stands a god, untouched by the devastation that spreads before it. Six vast wings of electric blue crackle as they expand above the beautiful form of a once human man; the swirl of light from the celestial wings glowing obscenely against the fog of desolation, like lightning caged in silver. The form’s pristine suit and perfectly groomed hair at odds with the decayed ruin he has wrought of this world.

The god does not look down to the work of its hands. Its eyes search the sky. Looking for a Father who should be outraged at the desecration of all He created. Yet the grey sky remains empty of anything but boiling smog. The world is broken, the battle is done, the only sounds to be heard are the moans of the dead and howl of the creatures who have inherited the Earth.

The god should laugh. It has won.

Instead It snorts a bitter sound through its nose. The noise could not really be called a laugh. The sound is not carefree and light; it is strained like the grating of broken glass swallowed into a bitter throat and coated in fury and disappointment because the god stands alone. The Father who should have responded with outrage is absent. Those brothers and sisters who should have lauded the new god in glory for all It has accomplished, are dead.

It thought It would be satisfied but there is no satisfaction in isolation.

There are other worlds that could also burn. More that could be ripped apart and torn asunder. Maybe enough to finally make an absent father take notice. To cause Him the same amount of grief as He has afflicted on those He abandoned.

But if the Father the new god intended to hurt chose not to see the death of His most beloved creation then why would He see the deaths of any other worlds? And without His recognition there is no vengeance. There is only ash on the wind.

And darkness consumes the world.

—o0o—

Darkness.

_This darkness… it’s all around me without a way out, it is like.. a prison. And these pictures I have seen - I know some of these places. They are not a TV show, they are the world. The real world. The world which burns and crumbles…. while I am trapped. Am laying trapped in a cold grey cell, while my mind is trapped in this dream. This nightmare._

_This is wrong. This is so wrong._

_How did it come to this?_

_Michael took me. I remember that now. And after that there was just this darkness. Like being lost and unable to find a signpost to point the way back home._

_I don't know how or why I see these glimpses of the world. Is it something I am doing? Or a torment sent from Michael? But piece by piece - like putting together a jigsaw puzzle - it is starting to make sense to me. And I wish it didn't. Because now all I can feel is this great swamp of pain and despair that is building up inside my chest. The world was not supposed to be like this. None of this was SUPPOSED to happen._

_The world should not be flooded in sickness where the air itself is a poison. I shouldn’t hear only the cries of the dead and the roar of monsters and demons._

_I don't want it to be like this. I want to be at home. With Cas and Dean and Sam. I want us all to be safe and happy. I want my Family….. Where are my Family?_

That thought sets the boy off calling. Calling for them like they are somewhere around the corner and he just has to find them.

 _I don't know how long I have spent calling. I feel like that ghost in the empty building (Maggie, that was Maggie, in the Bunker….. Maggie is dead?). I call harder and harder, they will know how to fix this. My family. The ones who raised me, who took me in, who taught me how to fight and what to fight for. Sam who always has a plan and who never gave up on me. Dean who is strong and tough and always finds a way to fix things. Cas who always protected me,_ will _always protect me, who first taught me what it meant to be family._

_I’m desperate for them to hear me. To answer me. To help me…._

_But no one hears me. No one comes._

_I want to curl into a ball and weep.  I want everything just to stop. I want to lie down and forget what I have seen. But I can't. It isn't what Dean would do. It isn't what Sam would do. It isn't what Cas would do. They would never give up. There has to be something_ **_I_ ** _can do._

The boy turns back to the darkness where he watched the pictures on the ‘television’.

_Maybe I can change the channel._


	7. CHAPTER 6 - And There Are Storms We Cannot Weather

—o0o—

**Jacks POV**

The space is dark, the air itself feels heavy, thick with the fumes of brimstone and death. It is periodically lit with flashes of red and white that stab at the eyes and offer illumination for only the briefest of seconds. In the flashes there appears the shape of a man. He is hung suspended in a web of chains. The hooks at the ends pierce his body and the lines of the metal pull taunt as they stretch into infinity. His blond hair is matted in blood that drips down one side of his face. His pale blue eyes are wide and staring, His mouth stretched wide in agony as he screams. The chains hold his naked body immobile, his arms outstretched with the spikes that are set through his biceps and hands. His feet spread wide above the void as the blood drips from his toes from the hooks in his calves and his ankles. More chains through his ribs and his belly. He should be dead, there is too much blood.

He is dead. For him this is what comes next and there is no reprieve. There is no one to hear his calls. Hell is empty and he is alone.  The demons have a new home, new toys to play with, but this man was not invited. Here he hangs and here he will stay. Frozen even as the flashes of red heat sear his skin. His skin painted crimson with flesh blood as the chains rip and tear, but never dying.

Jack should feel pity for the man who was seduced by the devil, but the boy knows what the man has done and there is no time to mourn the lost. He is looking for his Family and this man is not Family.

—o0o—

This space is outside. A road, cracked and broken and choked with weeds. Dying trees standing guard along its line. And at the side of the asphalt half buried in a ditch, light glints dully from broken glass and a crumpled body of metal. It is… was… the Impala. Dean’s car! So where is Dean? He wouldn't leave his car like this. One door hangs open, falling from broken hinges, a smashed air filtration unit discarded on the road. The front end of the car is caved in. The tires are shredded and the armored sides are covered in claw gouges. Between the armor plate welded to her frame, the once bright paint is caked in mud and grey dust. The bars around the windshield and sides have not prevented the windows from being smashed out and glass litters the ground. Only the odd patches of chrome left here and there catch the pale light.

Her trunk stands open, the devils trap almost obscured with a streak of black gore, but the arsenal is gone and a trail of red blood leads away from the wreckage.

Whatever happened Dean is not here. If he isn't dead then where is he?

—o0o—

Jack trains every thought he has on Dean. On the sound of his voice, the growl when he is angry or concerned. On the look that he gets in his eyes when he is determined. On the strength of his hands that can clench into a lethal fist but can also teach a boy how to drive or fish with skill and patient care. Jack builds up all the tiny things that make Dean, Dean. And he searches.

The feeling is faint when he finds it. Buried in darkness. But this darkness has no light, no flashes of red or white. No chains. This darkness moves and boils like a living thing. It is coiled and wrapped so tightly about the man that Jack almost cannot make him out. But there. There is the faint sound of the growl that Jack knows. That stubborn refusal to give in. That fight even though Dean’s strength is clearly failing.

Jack doesn't know what to do. He tries to reach out to his friend, to pull apart the darkness, but it is an image on a screen, and he is trapped in his own prison. So he calls.

“Dean! DEAN!” and for the tiniest shining second he thinks that Dean has heard him. The man stills his fight and the boy feels bright hope in his chest. The second is fleeting. The hope combusts as the hunter slumps in on himself hacking and coughing. The sound wet like the dark is filling his lungs. He can’t breath. He will drown.

No! No! Jack can't let that happen. The surge of panic in him is immediate.

Where is Sam? If Jack can't save Dean, maybe Sam can. He needs to find Dean’s brother and quick.

Jack casts a last look at the darkness wrapped figure slumped to the floor.

_I’m coming back Dean. I’ll find Sam and he will help. I’m coming back I promise._

—o0o—

The feeling of Sam is all about his eyes. Sam has old eyes. Wise old eyes that have known oceans of pain and hold the weight of the world but still manage to shine with concern and understanding. He sees things and he thinks long and hard about what he sees but most of all he feels. That is what Jack concentrates on as he focuses on Sam, searching for the mentor who will have the answers.

When Jack finds him though he finds no answers. The darkness clears and he see Sam standing in the courtyard of an old farmstead. The crumbling stone walls have been breached and a pack of ghouls flood into the muddy area in front of the house. Behind the hunter huddles a ragged family, the husband screaming as he clutches a jagged tear in his leg. The mother trying to gather her two frightened children. There are other people coming running from across the weed choked fields but they are still too far away. Though the hunter looks worn and gaunt, his hair too long, his clothes stained and torn, his face too thin and tired behind his shaggy beard, he fights with a smooth precision that the boy recognizes.

It doesn’t take long for the hungry ghouls to be cut down, the last one falling just as the other settlers arrive to help. Jack would cheer, but the newcomers don’t stop. They charge up to the stranger their knives and scythes swinging.

 _No! He was helping you! Stop!_  But of course they don't hear Jack’s shout and they don’t stop.

It is clear that Sam fights defensively at first, but the settlers seem as feral as the ghouls, screaming and snarling as they tear at the outsider. The hunter has no other choice but to fight back. Despite his best efforts his machete is soon covered in human blood atop the ghouls. It is kill or be killed.

Jack watches as Sam fights desperately to hold back three men who have been smart enough to attack together, when the young girl slips away from her mother and plants a small knife in the tall man’s lower back. His roar of pain sounds over the screams of the attackers and like sharks sensing blood in the water they are spurred on but the hunter’s long blade is still swinging. On instinct it flings round behind him to the source of the unseen attack, catching the small girl in the side of the neck with a dull thud. Sam’s eyes move to follow the impact of his weapon and there is a moment of frozen silence, everything stilling as the young girl falls to the mud. Her small eyes wide with surprise as her life drains away in a flood of crimson.

The mother screams a harrowing wail and jumps forward. Time jumps forward with a rush. The older woman does not come to cradle her fallen child but to avenge her. The ferocity of the fight before is nothing compared to the renewed attack of the settlers.

Sam has no option after that, he kills them all. They give him no other choice. The enraged mother, the limping father, the snarling outpost settlers.

All bar the small boy left in the doorway of the house when the woman joined the fight. The child stands silent staring with wide eyes at the blood covered stranger who stands amidst the even bloodier bodies of his family. He does not cry and he makes no move just stares, shell shocked.

Exhausted Sam falls to his knees, his left hand going to his back trying to stem the flow of blood that has been pouring from the wound. His knees land in the mud, the vivid memory of another muddy field and another stab wound to his back sending shivers down his spine. But here he is alone.

He needs to get up. He needs to dress the wound and get away from this place. But he cannot move. His eyes slip away from the small boy and land on the cold empty eyes of the dead girl laying not far from where he kneels.

Sam wishes he could cry, but his tears have long since died and his eyes are as dead as the girl’s.  He shows no sign that he hears a nephilim urgently calling his name, telling him his brother needs him, they all need him, pleading for him to get up.

It is no use. Sam is in need of help himself and he doesn't hear Jack’s cries any more then Dean did. If the humans can’t hear Jack then he needs to find someone who might.

Jack needs to find Cas.

—o0o—

Looking for Cas is different from looking for the brothers. Jack searches for the deep well of love that flows from the other angel but Cas has something more than a human. He is a being of Grace. Grace is a power that has a taste and feel that Jack knows in his core. It is less complex than a human soul but this particular Grace has a unique layer of humanity that it wears like armor to strengthen it. The Angel is only made stronger by his love and his pain, by the steadfast commitment he offers unconditionally to a nephilim not his own.

Cas should shine in Jack’s mind like a beacon, but even that feeling is weak when the boy finds its source.

Night has fallen in the ruined walls of an ancient monastery. Thousands of ghosts crowd the dark corners of the empty rooms and hallways of the old building within the compound walls. They wander or stand in clumps, their pale forms flickering and distorting, the noise of their cries rising like a screaming flock of crows on the wind. Some stare in blank silence, some wander and cry great wails of distress. Others scream their rage as they flash in and out of existence, the stained glass windows shattering, glass flying, fallen piles of masonry rising to swirl through the air in a violent tornado. It is chaos. But the greatest mass of them crowd within the old chapel at the heart of the grounds. Looking for sanctuary or a remembered sense of peace. There is none to be found.

And before the rotted wooden doors of the chapel stands the angel. His coat is torn and covered in dirt. His once white shirt is grey. His tired face is covered in the growth of a beard as if he has not even grace enough to maintain his vessel. Jack can see behind him his once proud wings, although long broken are now devastated. They trail in the dust, crushed and useless. He could not raise them in threat if he tried but the Angel ignores the ruined appendages as if they are of no consequence, though the very sight of them pierces Jack’s heart. Castiel however is concerned with other things.

Stampeding through the fallen gates of the Monastery walls in front of the chapel surges a hoard of demons. Hundreds, maybe thousands. The sight is a nightmare born of pure evil. Some ride broken human bodies, their eyes black as night, their faces contorted. Some swirl in plumes of smoke like a plague of stinging flies. Some form monstrous shapes, half human half beast, only before seen in the deepest depths of hell. It is not a sight that should be seen on Earth.

All the lone Angel has to hand is grim determination and the shining length of blade that gleams against the night in his hand. His Angel Blade. The only thing that is bright and clean in the bitter night. Neither determination nor blade will be enough against the hoard. The Angel should turn and run. He must know the odds are insurmountable but yet he stands firm.

The wave of evil surges like a tidal wave and falls crashing against the front of the chapel, a broiling mass of claws, and fangs, smoke and perversion. It swallows the Angel whole and the once sacred ground is no defense against their power.

Jack’s scream of _“Noooooooo”_ is lost within the storm as the Angel is lost from view.

—o0o—

Darkness falls over Jack’s eyes like the weight settling over his heart. He is back in the nowhere place. The darkness without the light of the television pictures. The syrup slow thoughts from before move faster now but his mind rushes in useless circles. Despair, grief and anguish battling to the forefront of his mind. But behind them burn anger and determination. It is these that finally win out.

No!

_This is not how it will be._

The nephilim boy had sought his family, looking for salvation. But it is they who are in need of help. If his family are not able to save him then he must save them.

What he does then, or how he does it, he couldn't explain if he tried.  But he knows why he does it. It is action fueled by the strongest need he has ever felt. The sight of Dean on this knees choking on darkness. The look in Sam’s eyes as he kneels bleeding in the mud. Cas refusing to run even as the hoard overwhelm him.

Jack takes all his fear and rage, his determination and anguish, his love and his devastation and he pours it through his mind. Lets it build and burn, pulling more and more in; an inferno built of Archangel Grace and fueled by a Human Soul.

The power within him starts to consume him, ripping his being to pieces, straining at his edges, burning his very bones. Yet still he gathers more. More than is possible to hold but he has no choice. He will not stop. It builds and builds and he knows he can't hold on, he is not enough. He is dying. Will die.

But he will not stop.

At the end the boy feels something give. Far away within a cold distant tomb he feels a wrenching tear as his heart burst within his chest. His flesh combusting into flames hot enough to melt even Enochian shackles, hot enough to sear away his flesh from his crumbling bones and to blast through a mountain of rubble. He knows this to be the end, but his last thought is that like his fathers he is proud that he went down fighting with all that he had.

.....

... And like the Big Bang at the start of the universe, like kick-starting the combustion at the heart of a star, like a Phoenix born from the flames, there explodes in this world a new type of Grace that this universe has never before seen. More powerful than anything that has come before it. Forged from archangel grace and a human soul completely and truly integrated, combined under unimaginable will and pressure into something far greater than the sum of its parts.

A Being that has no need of flesh. A Being of pure energy. Grace in the ultimate sense of the word. The perfect human angel benediction.

The new born Being cannot just feel every atom in the universe, it IS every atom in the universe. It is power unimaginable. It hears the thought of every sentient creature that exists. Sees the history of this world laid out like pictures in a book, observes the many thousand paths of the future stretch before it like the branches of a tree. Knows that with a single thought it could change the flow of history. But The Being also remembers being a young boy named Jack, who had three fathers to show him courage and determination, forgiveness and compassion, loyalty and love. To show him that without humanity power is a cold and unforgiving god.

It is with these lessons that its first thought is: _THIS IS NOT HOW THE WORLD WILL BE_

The power is new and strange but The Being assess the puzzle with the acuity it learnt from its father. It forges its path with the determination it learnt from its father. It works patiently with the love it learnt from its father.

This time the words are a command

**THIS IS NOT HOW IT WILL BE**

The command is bright. It is strong.

It is a promise.

It is family.

—o0o—

Jack opens his eyes. Eyes that flame gold like the birth of the universe, like the first dawn of creation, in a newborn face that shines like the dawn.

LET ME SHOW YOU THE NEW DREAM.


	8. EPILOGUE - I dreamed that love would never die, I dreamed that God would be forgiving

**—o0o—**

**A NEW DREAM**

The warmth when it comes starts slow but builds quickly. A gentle glow that doesn't burn but soothes the eyes even as it chases back the darkness. It drains the ick from his skin and from his lungs. Warms him like the arms of a mother’s hug.

Dean blinks gently as he feels himself lifted from the darkness and surrounded by a golden light that comforts like the warmth of summer sun through the windshield of the Impala, like the cradle of soft leather as his baby rumbles down an open road, like the carefree laugh of his brother when he was too young to know how cruel the world was.

It feels like home.

—o0o—

The warmth when it comes starts slow but builds quickly.  It covers the cold squelch of mud beneath his knees and the sticky wash of blood that flows down his back. It surrounds his faltering heart and the beat strengthens with new life.

Like the sun breaking through the clouds Sam feels the cold fog of poison clear from the air, the wind becoming light and fresh; clean like he hasn't felt in years. He feels a burden slip from his mind; a weight so much greater than he knew he was carrying. The new sense of freedom is a revelation. And he blinks as a bewildered, but very much alive, young girl blinks back at him from the ground. Her sudden smile is shy, eyes lowered and the tip of her tongue just peeking from behind her teeth. It reminds Sam of a smile that he has known better than his own since he was just a young child.

The girl looks over to see her family smiling back at her. And as she gets up and rushes into their waiting arms, Sam almost doesn't recognize the feeling that fills his chest. It feels like peace.

—o0o—

The warmth when it comes starts slow but builds quickly.  He had thought he was dead. The pain and the tearing of claws ripping at his vessel, the last traces of his grace bleeding away had left him cold and dark. The foul press of evil surrounding him. But the warmth starts in his hands and his feet and spreads up his arms and legs until it pools in his chest. The taint and pressure of the demon hoard lifts away like dew steaming off in the morning sun. He is covered by a golden light so much warmer than the pale blue of Grace. A warmth that sings.

It reminds Castiel of the first ever dawn, when the world was golden and new and the Heavenly Host were joined in unity and holy communion with a bond and devotion that was absolute…. But this is warmer, more human.

It’s like a hand reaching down to grasp his and raise him gently to his feet. A love that is everything because it knows and accepts every part of him.

It feels like soaring in a perfect summer sky. It feels like home. It feels like family.

—o0o—

Like honey poured fresh from a comb, the golden light flows and settles onto the ravaged world, gaining speed as it goes.

An Archangel stares, dumbfounded as the glittering flood approaches. For a moment he wonders if his Father has returned at last. But as the warmth surrounds him burning away his grace and setting him free like the sparks from a bonfire, he lets go of the bitter thought. He lets go of all thoughts and is at last ready to accept the peace of oblivion.

The gates of Hell fall before the resolute flow of light. With a last groan they collapse in on themselves. The dark is swept away by a fire that does not burn, by a light that does not pierce. The tsunami tumbles onwards, unstoppable, claiming every corner, washing away every stain.

As it nears the furthest reaches of the most forlorn and forgotten depths, the light encounters a Cage. Once an impregnable bastille within which the scourge of mankind was sealed, now a prison to the lost. It is the final resting place of a mad archangel and a human boy, abandoned to the abyss; chess pieces dropped from a board and sacrificed to fate. The light does not judge, it does not weigh, it just is; immutable and unstoppable. The doors of the Cage fall as easily as did the gates of Hell and those tormented in isolation are caught up into the bright cascade. The embrace of peace is a welcome relief to both as they find themselves released from their burdens.

From that place the light continues downwards until at last it arrives to the very loneliest depths, the very end point of Hell, where a single soul hangs in torment. Nick does not fear the molten torrent of light. He welcomes it. And as his soul burns and fades to nothing, the man smiles. At last he is warm.

—o0o—

There is no place that the light does not conquer and everywhere it touches the World is washed clean.

The hordes of demons try to flee but they are overtaken and their black taints are burned from their hosts, the poisoned particles of smoke lifted away and scattered to nothing in the warm breeze.

Like a flock of birds greeting the dawn lost human souls are lifted up from the earth and paint the sky in golds and peach. Even those buried in deep bunkers are not hidden from the light and rise to join the throng. The great multitude of souls shining in brilliance before fading away, the weary at last finding their rest.

Among the last to disappear from view is the glowing form of a young boy of ten waiting above an old Scrapyard who runs joyfully to the open arms and smiling faces of a mother and father who have been searching for him. As one they leave behind all their troubles.

Even in the last dark corners of the world monsters find nowhere to hide. The wave reaches them wherever they cower. It flows into every cave and ruined building. Every swamp and ruin. It covers them all and purges their rage. They find themselves after it passes. Men and women sit blinking in the new light of dawn as fever and hunger drains from their bodies. Their memories of before, of being human, opening up to them like the petals of a flower before the sun. The light of morning chasing away forever the shadows of the night.

And behind the tidal wave of gold the sun shines radiant in an azure sky. Green shoots unfurl from every surface to greet the new day, the ruin of the past covered in a velveteen verdant blanket. A light fresh breeze lifts the fog of decay and sickness from the world and a gentle fall of life-giving rain clears away the despair. The people stand up straight as Hope fills their hearts.

There is no more heaven no more hell; just peace. And for the first time in a long time, there is the promise of happiness.

—o0o—

  _For he will wipe away every tear from their eye._

_There will be no more darkness or mourning or crying or pain._

_For the old order is passed away and the world is become new._

—o0o—

A golden sun exalts in a virgin blue sky as the distant rumble of a 1967 Chevrolet Impala breaks the wonder-hushed silence.

A tall man named Sam finds himself standing on the side of a clear grassy road. Trees covered in the first buds of spring surrounding him on every side. He looks down to see himself dressed in a clean plaid shirt that smells of sunshine and lavender. His knife is gone from his belt. There is no pain in his body, no tiredness in his limbs and within himself Sam feels a peace like he hasn’t known since he was 5 years old and held tight in gentle arms that would protect him from anything.

He doesn't startle when a hand lands softly upon his shoulder, he wonderingly turns to meet deep blue eyes.

The Angel stands beside him, his long coat whole and gently fluttering in the soft wind. His blue tie askew like always but his face as open and happy as the human has ever seen it. Cerulean eyes shine with joy and his clean shaven face is creased by a wide smile, his great black wings fully visible in the mortal plain flare proudly to greet the sky.

Sam smiles at his friend, dimples piercing his cheeks, as he pulls him in, enfolding the other tightly in his arms. Cas doesn’t hesitate to return the hug, holding tight, every line of his body expressing the words he can’t find. The pain and the anguish of long years falling away.

It’s almost reluctantly that the two let go, turning in unison to face the road as a well-known growl proclaims an imminent arrival. The Impala purrs around the corner and into view, her sleek sides shining like liquid mercury in the Stirling light, the silhouette of a lone figure at home behind her wheel.

When she draws to a halt, the Angel and the man can't help rushing forward, even as the figure is turning off the engine and wrenching open his door.

Dean’s grin is the cocky smirk of a 20 year old boy without a care in the world as he runs to his brother and his best friend. Light glints golden through his short spiked hair, is reflected brilliantly in his forest green eyes and catches the bright white of his teeth as throws open his arms and he laughs.

“Did ya miss me?”

—o0o—

Jack feels his heart swell as he watches his loved ones in their happiness and he knows that there is no place in this bright wide universe that he would rather be.

This is a new day, a new road to be traveled; a journey into the promise of tomorrow where home is the company not the destination.

He rejoins his family to a chorus of joyful exclamations and three sets of open arms welcoming him home.

The new god looks with wonder at the familiar faces alight in the radiant dawn of his band new world and he smiles…

 

FOR IT IS GOOD.

 

—FIN—

 

 


End file.
